How Service Resolution Management (SRM) Transforms CX

The service resolution management (SRM) wave is all about giving better serve customers. How different is it from CRM? What new opportunities and challenges does it bring for software vendors and end customers?

Contributor

- Alan Hubbard, Executive Vice President, R&D, KANA

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Good morning folks and welcome to the show. It needs careful planning and flawless execution to make technology work for us but how many times do we succeed? On this show we invite business leaders and subject matter experts with extensive experience in technology management. The intent here is to learn from their experience and discuss better ways to manage technology. To learn more about the show, please visit talkshow.avval.com that is talkshow.a-v-v-a-l.com Today’s topic is the Service Resolution Management that is SRM Wave. Our guest for today’s show is Alan Hubbard. Alan joined KANA in 2002 in June 2002 and currently serves as Executive Vice President of Research and Development. Alan brings more than 20 years of engineering and management expertise to his role at KANA.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:48]:
Prior to KANA, Alan was the Vice President of Engineering as for Alta Works Corporation where he designed and developed an industry leading web transaction management tool. Prior to Alta Works, Alan held various management positions at Hewlett-Packard Company including Worldwide Technology Program Manager, Enterprise Accounts Organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:07]:
Good morning Alan.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:08]:
Welcome to the show.

Alan Hubbard [00:01:09]:
Good morning. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:12]:
How’s the life treating you?

Alan Hubbard [00:01:13]:
Excellent, very good.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:17]:
We have been talking about SRM lately. Earlier it was CRM at any whenever any technology is brought into being, there’s always a compelling business need. I hope there’s a compelling business need always. What is the case in case of SRM?

Alan Hubbard [00:01:34]:
It’s very interesting if you look at CRM from a historical perspective within the early 80s and 90s, routing the customer’s phone call, putting them to the right agent and things like that and then over the last 10 years we’ve also done a really nice job attacking those cases so managing that interaction but we haven’t done a really good job is actually solving the custom and problems and so when we look at this we do a lot of work with SSPA which is the Service and Support Professionals Association, which is really our target market. When we look at who we’re trying to sell into and they have come back and told us when they look at audit support, the cost of providing servers. If you look at what it costs provide the service of routing a call, it’s only 5% and if you look at the cost of what it takes to scratch a case, it’s a 15% where our call centers are spending all of their money on and the most expensive thing they have and 80% of the dollars spent in a contact center is sent up on the service resolution solving the customers problem and today we don’t have anything that does us and we’re bringing to the market economy is service resolution

Alan Hubbard [00:02:52]:
and with the goal there of actually solving such a problem.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:57]:
So when you mention about this 5% and 15% and the 80%, isn’t that the very reason why CRM was built is to effectively deal with that problem like basically what you’re trying to do, after all, at the end of it, a human being is talking to another human being and trying to solve a problem. CRM was created as more the right type of plumbing that’s needed for the information to flow effectively so that eventually this problem gets solved. So where were the bottlenecks which kind of gave rise to the SRM waves?

Alan Hubbard [00:03:26]:
I agree, CRM was invented to manage the customer interaction and to resolve the customer problems and the focus though has really been on the management of that and what has always been missing as part of that is integrating the overall business process with CRM. So people have done a great job of implement product like kind of contact center PeopleSoft, Siebel, all of these things are in place. People have spent a tremendous amount of money and they do a great job of managing that interaction but there is no real integration back into any kind of business process that might actually help you solve the customer’s problem. When you do one of a contact center today it’s really interesting because you’ll walk up to the computer that they’re using and it is literally covered with little yellow stickies and then you look at the on the manual, then the locations behind them and you pull out a manual and it just all geared and it’s highlighted and you say to them how do you solve your problems and they this is it and they you look around and you say this is how I’m solving my problem.

Alan Hubbard [00:04:34]:
I have the answer to this question up here on this little yellow sticky, I have it in this manual and when that person walks out the door logos that knowledge it and so what we’re trying to do is take that knowledge and actually automate it and provide a mechanism that we can drive people to entice cohesive and accurate answers every single time. So the other problem is if you were to call in through a contact center and you get an agent, you talk to him or her and then they give you an answer, you crawl back a little later, you may get an almost a different, you get a different agent, you might get a different answers and that just doesn’t promote optimal confidence at all.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:18]:
Okay, let’s pick up a scenario. For example, I call into one of these known telecom companies and what you’re saying is exactly right. Every time I get a different answer. So what is happening there? Are they not putting their notes properly or every time they’re looking into. They’re basically thinking allowed and telling us what could be the problem versus actually going back and looking at a library or a knowledge base that would have been created over time.

Alan Hubbard [00:05:42]:
It could be and it could be a knowledge base, it could be a set of manuals. One of the real issues that the telecom companies today have is that, there’s two things actually one is being turnover in the call centers is tremendous. I think it averages in the telecom industry about 40% a year. Studies a whole bunch of training issues that they had and bringing people up to the feed on their systems as they go through this. The other issue as you look at it is they come out with new products and I’m not talking about one new product but 10 to 15 to 20 products a year and so now these agents need to get up to the feet very quickly and it’s almost impossible for them to do this. We today are working with a large silicon company implementing SRM there and when they came back to us and similar environment as I described before, we actually sat down with them and said okay, let’s document the business processes that your agents use on a daily basis.

Alan Hubbard [00:06:45]:
They came back with 1100. There is no way any human beings can remember all of those and there’s no way that you can ensure that you’re going to get the same answer across from different people and so even though they may have knowledge bases, the ability to get that information out, is front of each other by the person who’s actually accessing the knowledge base. So one person may do research one way, another person may do research another way. They may not get the same answer. So what we’re trying to do is we’re providing a mechanism of business process on top of that allows you to define that and then drive the people to the right answers.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:29]:
So it’s almost like a decision support system or an expert system which kind of understands what is the kind of nature of the problem you plug in the right. It’s almost like a Google to really

Alan Hubbard [00:07:38]:
fit a little bit more sophisticated than that but it truly does rely on rich technology, it truly does rely on knowledge management technology but it also relies on you being able to define your business context and that is sometimes the most difficult piece of this is really like I said, the solar communications company that we’re working with today is they had 1100, business processes and, by the way, they want to go live next June with this. Finally, we looked at it and said in the time we have, we can define 100 or 150 and go from there and over time they’ll be able to see other thousand to get them out the doors.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:20]:
So when we discussed about, as you described SRM and what we also know about CRM, there is a significant amount of overlap in there but if we were to itemize the overlap in so that we have a clarity of understanding what are those overlaps?

Alan Hubbard [00:08:35]:
I really don’t think there is an overlap. What I would look at as our end is as an augmentation or an addition to CRM. So it’s something that is missing today that isn’t part of the CRM and what it’s going to take. What you now have is within the existing CRM applications, the ability to manage that interaction. Now what we’re going to provide is you obviously need that. You have to be able to manage your customer interaction but now what we’ll do as part of tracking that case, you’ll be able to go out and actually solve problems and actually work through and provide the customer in a timely manner. Give them the information, give them the answers they need

Alan Hubbard [00:09:20]:
because the other part of this is, and we all know this is a tough market to sell into and you really need to have happy customers and part of the things that you see and, again, some of the work that we’ve done with SSPA is we have seen customer satisfaction in the financial industries, for example, in the last eight years has dropped like a rocket and so what that means is our customers are unhappy and if we can’t make them happy and when do we get a chance to talk to them is when they call us. So if we can now bring them in, satisfies their issues, resolve their problem, we are more likely going to be able to tell them something later because they’re going to remember that interaction with you.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:08]:
When we talk about SRM, we definitely did pick up some of the chronic issues that you mentioned. People, every time we go and we think of a different agent, he has a different answer. Are there any other chronic issues that you see which are actually being addressed by the solution?

Alan Hubbard [00:10:22]:
Yes, there’s a couple of things. One is overall, and I touched on it a little while ago, is the fact that when you look at the training cost that you have in the call centers today, again because of turnover, it is almost prohibitive that as you bring people in, the training that you have to give them and the training is usually on how do you use my billing system, how do I use the customer information system, how do I use the order of billman system and so you’re training people on systems as opposed to your business process and that what that happens is those are very difficult to learn, they’re very difficult to understand and they’re very difficult for people to manage as they’re talking to a customer. So that all of that contributes to the high turnover and so what you do when you bring SRM in, you don’t train people on systems, what you train them on, is business process. How do I manage my business, how do I execute within my own company and in that way you can easily start to train them more quickly and so they learn faster and you have, you’re training them on a business process as opposed to multiple IT systems.

Alan Hubbard [00:11:35]:
So really that’s what SRM brings for the table there. So now you’re actually reducing training cost and the time that it takes to bring agents up to speed in there and things like that.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:48]:
If suppose a customer has CRM in place and CRM could actually just, it could be mostly manual, it could be a hybrid between automation and manual or totally automated. So in each case you’re saying that SRM is more like an augmentation to CRM. Doesn’t it become like a weakest link issue based on how strong their CRM system is going to actually finally, at the end of the day, end user does not care whether we have a very sophisticated CRM system plus SRM system but what they see is that whether the problems got solved or not, when you are providing SRM solutions out there to the customers, what is the level of prerequisite that you would put in place for them to, for you to give us, for you to have a claim that yes, that time is going to work because if their CRM is not up to speed or does not have the potential or the power that you would expect it to have, the end result would be the end. The customers will not be able to be satisfied because SRM cannot carry the whole load by itself.

Alan Hubbard [00:12:47]:
So that’s an excellent question and when we look at it today, we take this for what we like to say is or augmentation strategy with SRM we’re not out to rip and replaced people or contact center or anything else that you have installed today. So what we’ve done is we’ve built out an AI bar that from within any contact center you could implementation, you could actually what was designed is we’ve given some custom code, you can input in the kind of contact center into Sieble, whatever and then essentially what we will do is you click on that redrag the information from the context on a screen. So we’ll pull the necessary information, whether it might be customer information, it might be whatever, and then it will slot you into SRM and now this is where you now decide what is the problem I’m trying to solve and you may say there may be a dropdown list of saying here are the business processes that you want to work through. How do you do that and drive that through because what we don’t want to do is leave it up to the agent who again just okay, I’m going to search through the knowledge base to find this.

Alan Hubbard [00:13:58]:
We want to say, okay, we are adding a new customer, okay, what is the business process for that? We need to take the following information and the screen will pop up and say here, excuse me Mr. Customer, here is the information that I need from you right now. Take it, you enter it, you hit enter. Now from there what happens is there’ll be a call out to the customer information system to update that information. So that happened as opposed to the agents jumping out to the other screen saying excuse me while I log into our customer information management system. Can you give me this information, okay, we’re done with that now, okay, now I need some billing information.

Alan Hubbard [00:14:36]:
Let me jump over the other system. We’ll drive you through those systems within what we call a resolution flow and we’ll make those tile out for you.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:45]:
So it’s basically you can say a hybrid between a knowledge management and a workflow management. That is what’s going to give the power to an individual to solve a case.

Alan Hubbard [00:14:55]:
That’s a great characterization.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:57]:
Great, let’s have a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back after these messages and we will talk a little bit about how SRM is being priced and what kind of different flavors that are being offered for different segments of the market because after all everyone wants to solve their customer problem. It be a small business, mid sized business or a very large organization. So please stay tuned. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:59]:
Welcome back to the show folks. For listeners who just tuned in, today’s topic is the Service Resolution Management Wave. Our guest for today’s show is Alan Hubbard. Alan is Executive Vice President of Research and Development with KANA Software. Before the break we picked up a question which we are supposed to be answering now is the way CRM is being priced, the way it’s being brought into the market and different flavors that are available because if you look at every business needs to serve its customer and definitely they want to do it well. Even that it could be 800 pound gorilla which would equally have a steep price tag or it could have different levels of service that is available. So how is this whole SRM market. How are these SRM product suites which are being sold being packaged?

Alan Hubbard [00:18:41]:
We’re bringing SRM to market as part of our overall knowledge management operate. When you buy our knowledge management through itunes you have the possibility to create that with additional functionality. We’re told with you the SRM functionality as part of that. So that’s how we’re packaging that and bringing it to the marketplace.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:03]:
So your organization primarily has been dealing with somewhat larger, mid to large sized organization and as we all know, the economy of this country is also mostly driven by SMBs. So given that there must be this SRM market or the whole we have no, I don’t know how much of quantification has been done in terms of how big this market is, but definitely a very big component of that would be that small to mid sized businesses to some extent also get benefited by this. Given that maybe KANA doesn’t go in there, at the same time we are looking at the whole industry, this particular solution industry where other vendors might be positioning to these smaller vendors also. Is there a trend towards that?

Alan Hubbard [00:19:42]:
I think there is. When we look at, it has been very much focused with the fast three or four years on the enterprise days we have product in 54 of the top 100 consecutive companies in the world and that has been our focus but even now we’re looking at saying okay, how do we take there is a need of the smallest medium sized companies to be able to do this. Then we’ve actually started to look at closing some of our products for the smaller companies and I think SRM will be a great thing for combination in a hosted environment. So they could have it in a single place and have some of an out of the box use of it.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:19]:
Let me ask you this. When we see this wireless and mobile technology coming into being, there would definitely be, I mean unless otherwise, you’re saying customer service is solely being done from a call center. Could there not be an avenue where mobile and wireless could be used anytime, anywhere and if you’re talking to one agent, he could always be tracked. I’m just thinking aloud here. So is there a way we can expand what the SRM offers into mobile and wireless?

Alan Hubbard [00:20:47]:
That’s interesting. One of the challenges always of using mobile technology is the user interface piece because you need to really simplify it greatly in order to do that but there is no reason, there is no reason why you couldn’t use that technology. I think every organization is becoming more and more geographically dispersed. I actually have five development sites throughout the world and so people and I have a large group of people that just work from home and so as, the industry changes, the market changes, the world changes. I think you bring these technologies to the fore and there is no reason why you could use those types of technologies because people are going to start to demand it.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:34]:
See, this basically brings up an idea where one is to solve a customer’s problem sitting in a call center or some your own office for that matter. Other is that you might actually go and be visiting a customer and see what’s going on at that time and when they ask you a question, you should be able to look up something while you’re sitting there versus looking for a destop. This is just a thought.

Alan Hubbard [00:21:55]:
No, that’s a great thought. I’d just think if you were able to pull out your BlackBerry and get onto the web run, sit there and say here are the 15-20 business processes that we’ve designed to do in a wireless mode and then actually execute that and give the customer the answer while you’re standing there beside them. That’s customer service.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:15]:
That’s what I’m saying. So while we have the underlying fabric there, so might as well expand this offering. Maybe this will turn out to be a new feature of your product.

Alan Hubbard [00:22:23]:
I’m going to have to mention that to my architect. Thank you Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:28]:
All right, so are there any additional benefits that could be realized in a B2B environment versus a B2C environment. The reason I say this is because suppose a telecom company and I’m a residential customer. So the way they would handle with, handle the problem with that we’re having is of course sitting in a call center and things like that and of course we are somehow sending them that we are telling them this is what our problem is. It’s a different kind of workflow. Whereas when it turns out to be a B2B for example, I have an enterprise customer and we are a business and we would rather have a proactive mechanism that before they actually call us, there could be some kind of a triggering mechanism that a problem occurred. For example, your software, it’s installed somewhere now before a person actually calls you, you know that something like this has occurred.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:14]:
They click a button and it automatically sends you a problem and you are already doing your due diligence so that by the time these guys call you, you already done the necessary due diligence and you are far ahead in the game of solving the customer issue. So I’m just trying to look at B2C versus B2B environments in which SRM could play different type of role. So maybe more proactive and more efficient and effective in case of B2B.

Alan Hubbard [00:23:37]:
Absolutely, proactive notification, which is a big part of CRM even today, is critical for this type of thing and if that is a well defined process or business process that you’ve worked through, that is an excellent way to implement it because the sooner you know what the customer’s problems are before they even get on the phone with you, the better off you are.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:00]:
And enterprise customers would actually welcome that because if you cannot tell your residential customer to put 10 slacks in there, but if they know that your customer service turnaround time would be cut into half if their enterprise application could introduce this trigger something which you provide to them which further beacons back into your servers or does something like that which could further enhance your customer service capabilities.

Alan Hubbard [00:24:21]:
Exactly, that is something that we’re hearing more and more out in the field. People again proactively wanting to be able to solve their customers problem.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:34]:
So starting from the packaging, after all, in with all the discussions that we’ve had, we’ve seen that it’s knowledge management and then secure communication, especially for enterprise who want to have secure communication about the issues that they’re having and self service capability and automated messaging and all other mature technologies which were in some form or fashion available in an enterprise and we are in SRM kind of packaging them just looking at it as are we supposed to be replacing those technologies because at the end of it your SRM is packaging the same set of technologies and if a company already has those technologies, would they just off them and use SRM?

Alan Hubbard [00:25:11]:
When I think about this and I’ve seen a number of companies take our knowledge management system and I knowledge made the kind of framework that has business goals as part of it and they’re attempted small SRMs because acknowledgement has decision trees in there and things like that and what it means, what they’re doing is they’re really, tying it together with bailing wire and then bubble gum because it’s not a cohesive set of technologies that work well together and so when you look at this, these technologies are out there and people could spend a tremendous amount of time to work smoothly and say I’m going to tie all these things and they could build their own SRMs That was definitely a possibility. What SRM would bring to the table is this is gonna be a tool that built to solve this problem. It is going to be a tool that works well together. So it’s going to have associated business rules, workflow scripting, and a URL day that is going to allow you to fill those things out. So it’s much more user friendly, it’s much more intrusive and it’s much easier to get up and running so you can expand the product and then use it right then.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:26]:
So you’re saying that there would there could be some redundancy, if a dollar company had to adopt SRM, then there could be some redundancy in the packages that they already had, but simply because they so packages were not being used effectively in automating a business process or handling a workflow, even though the money was spent in that it’s worth spending money again into a somewhat tightly integrated application like SRM.

Alan Hubbard [00:26:48]:
Yes, exactly.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:49]:
Okay, so at the same time the follow up question I had for that is just because SRM tightly integrates a bunch of technology which exists there and or workflow aspects which are already there, we are again getting into the you can say dilemma with respect to open architectures and tightly integrated ERPs. I will not call it an ERP, but this is your mini ERP if you will. So how do we take care of a situation where a tightly integrated systems were think of the past and people don’t want to deal with them anymore because if you had to pull the plug on a smaller piece, you could not and if you had to make a change, it’s a mammoth change. So let’s take care of this question and discuss this in more detail when we come back from the break. Please stay tuned listeners. I’ll be right back. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Speaker D [00:29:49]:
Welcome back to Managing Technology the Right Way for Sun. Joe Gol Brought to you by the University of Phoenix Online. Call in with your questions at one main 662-33-7861. Now back to the show. Here’s son Joe Gall.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:05]:
Welcome back to the show, folks. For listeners who just tuned in, today’s topic is the Service Resolution Management Wave. Our guest for today’s show is Alan Hubbard. Alan is the Executive Vice President of Research and Development with KANA Software. Before the break, we picked up a point where we spoke about SRM being a packaging of different knowledge management, secure communication, cell service capability, automated messaging, related mature technologies and we are packaging them and when we are packaging them for it to effectively and efficiently work or basically handle a workflow, that means in a way we are tightly packaging them. That brings up an important point of what problems we have with an ERP application is that once you want to fix one thing, there are a lot of regression issues and other things that might pop up which would cause more problems than the benefit that we will get out of it. So how SRM is being packaged so that it eats the cake and have it too. It does not have the problems that an ERP has of tight integration

Sanjog Aul [00:31:02]:
at the same time, be able to follow the right path of open architecture where you can do plug and plays and things like that.

Alan Hubbard [00:31:10]:
That’s a great question. The way we look at this and the product itself is then architected on J2E and DotNet with utilization of web services architecture that you can use and plug into as part of it and as I mentioned before, we also are partnering with companies like DEA and TIBCO and Web Methods to provide an EAI interface to the product so that you can call it out from within your ERP system or your SOC system or your Siebel system or your contact center system. So we’re really focused on providing the ability to access the system in a manner that is easier for the customer, easier for the IT organization to work with that and then as far as it being a package solution via something that is more open source or anything like that, I think truly when you look at a product like this, what you want to have is a company that’s going to stand behind it and that is going to listen to its customers and drive new functionality back into the product and maintain it over time and that’s what I think the value of having a package solution does is because we’re going to be very focused on making sure that SRM or as we call it resolution is really an industry leading solution.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:32]:
So you are focusing on this as a workflow, all workflow management and knowledge management combination as we said and you will try to enhance just this fees versus trying to delve into 500 other areas?

Alan Hubbard [00:32:44]:
Absolutely, as we look at this as a nice upgrade to our knowledge management capability and also as an augmentation through our contact center and other CRM products.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:56]:
So what is, what has been the first reaction of the people who see it? What are the good and bad reactions?

Alan Hubbard [00:33:01]:
I think first thought everyone we talk to, whether it’s the customers or the analysts that we work with, they all look and say yes, this is the right problem to solve. So they look at that and say you need to help us do this and as we begin to, we have, we’re going to have a release in November and we’re working with a couple of customers right now as early adopters and they’re driving again, we like to use early adopters because I like to get such customer involved and get their feedback in early so that we may not have all of their feedback in the November release, but we’ll be able to then start the plan in the future and take that feedback in but what they look at is they like the ease of use, they like the ability to create their resolution flows on the fly and then they also like the part where, as I mentioned before, is within a resolution flow, you can drop out and pull data back into the resolution flow from another system. So that’s really two key things. They like the simplicity of it and then they also like the fact that they’re able to go out to other systems.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:11]:
When you are asking the management to change the business processes in some cases, not all cases, but if they have some customer service, as we already mentioned or we already discussed that your system could be effective provided that underlying business processes are at least being thought through and they really make sense. So when you go back and you say there is something not right in the way business processes have been laid out for customer service resolution and CRM and SRM, then what is the pushback that you get and how do you go about handholding them through and also convincing them that no, this business process needs to change?

Alan Hubbard [00:34:45]:
I think as people look at this, it’s definitely take or requires that the business takes a lead and the business says yes, we are going to manage ourselves, we are going to define these processes and work through it. That has to come first even before they decide that they’re going to buy SRM because until they understand that they have an issue and until they desire to solve that problem, technology is not going to fix it for us. So for me to come in and say, here, buy this because it will solve a problem and then define the problem for them, that’s backwards. They need to understand if they have a problems that they want to document these things and then we can have a discussion as to how to do this.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:33]:
So what kind of benchmark could you use? Do you actually are wearing your consultative hat, going in there to help them fine tune or optimize their manual SRM process and then come and say, hey, now this is a package that could help you automated.

Alan Hubbard [00:35:47]:
We do that at times. We get a lot. We get involved in a couple areas. As I mentioned before, we like to do early adopter programs. We also like to do proof of concepts and I think in a proof of concept, oftentimes you are doing things like that. What you’re doing is you’re in there, you’re involved, you’ve got technology, you’re trying to model it based on what you know of the customer’s problems and then you can learn together how to solve it.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:13]:
So does SRM not have an underlying theoretical methodology or something in place which could be used as a yardstick? Whether the end result of whatever you suggest to them and whatever comes out to be the final business process which will be automated using your SRM package, is that the right one, of course, nobody can say 100%, but at least it’s in the right direction. What is the benchmark or the yardstick that could be used by companies?

Alan Hubbard [00:36:37]:
So what we do in that case is we provide vertical and so we’ll deliver along with the knowledge management and SRM product, we’ll define verticals that will work in the particular industry that they’re there. So out of the box you may get some things that is 50 to 70% defined as part of that but at any business, as you look at the way they do business, you can compare telecoms and say, yes, in general they do it this way but then the business process starts to really be company specific. So you need to give them a vanilla implementations that they can then model and grow and match to their own company’s process.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:23]:
So when you’re all done with the, you can say implicit or implied selling from the standpoint, okay, this is, and this is not you, KANA, in particular, I’m just picking up the whole SRM industry or vendor group that is going to be pitching this solution to the vendors. Once you have told them yes, you need it, and then you help them go through the business process optimization for the service resolution. Then comes the measures hawk, ROI and TCO, which would actually have them sign on the dotted line, how do you, what kind of measure, how do you help them and are there any specific measures that could be picked up, any formulas, something which would help them make a proactive assessment of what they’re going to get out of this?

Alan Hubbard [00:38:06]:
There’s actually three things we look at. One is overall cost reduction and so by defining your business processes, by automating them, you’re going to get yours. You’re going to solve your customers problems faster and you are going to give them the right answers and by solving them their problems faster and giving them the right answers, you’re actually going to be able to deal with more customers and so there’s going to be an overall cost reduction. You may be able to even reduce the number of heads that you have to have supporting these because now you have a process that you’re managing. The second thing is we actually look at this and say SRM is going to help you increase revenue

Alan Hubbard [00:38:48]:
and why though is because again, if you’re resolving, if you’re actually solving your customers problems, if you’re actually doing that, it’s most likely going to lead to future business. Well, again, if I hang up for my telecom provider and I’m actually happy because I got an answer and it was relatively quickly, I’m going to say they may actually even offer to sell me something then, but I’m going to be more inclined to do more business with them and that’s going key and then finally the way we look at this is again, we’re not trying to rip and replace, we’re not trying to come in and say, no, everything you’ve done for the past 10 years is wrong, rip it out and with the ends, what we’re saying is, no, this is a value add augmentation strategy. So you’ll be able to get this up and running, you’ll be able to see ROI much more quickly and it’ll start to add value.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:43]:
When we look at SRM, definitely, while we are helping solve the problem, it’s also generating data and it’s also identifying patterns of what works and what doesn’t work. So do you think in fact you’d be able to give a good description of how the business intelligence could benefit overall with business intelligence for an organization benefit from SRM?

Alan Hubbard [00:40:04]:
I think one of the things that SRM has to do in the future is learned and so one of the things that we’re looking at, our resolution flows is as you define these things and as you pull information together, you can keep, you can maintain. So you’re on the fly and you’re creating a resolution for it because this is a new business process that you’re dealing with a customer for real time. SRM needs to learn those things and as you learn those things, you feed that back into business intelligence because what does business intelligence do? It provides you a mechanism to run your business.

Alan Hubbard [00:40:38]:
It’s a methodology that says, is a dashboard that I’m giving you that you can actually pull and understand the various metrics. SRM is going to be able to give you some of those metrics. SRM is going to tell you how long it took to manage that customer interaction. SRM is going to tell you whether or not you were successful in reaching that and as I said before, as you looked at this and know that you need to the customer satisfaction is dropping and in order to keep your customers happy, you have to do this better. These are going to be key metrics for any business to run themselves with.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:12]:
So one was the statistical business intelligence that we’re talking where we would get some numbers, okay, what’s these many people got successfully, they had their problem successfully resolved. Other thing is the semantic side of it, as I discussed, as I just mentioned, about the fact that if a particular approach to solving a problem helps, so then let that be made available to other agents as well as something which it could be, which is tried and tested and work. So that could be a business problem or a customer service problem resolution workflow which is learned on the fly and it is embedded in your library now and this made available to other agents. They can made basically it’ll result in faster resolution even then.

Alan Hubbard [00:41:49]:
I agree. I think one of the things as we look at that to save any customer interaction, it costs money and so the quicker, you can do these things the better of you are from your company perspective, but also from the customer’s perspective.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:06]:
Lets take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back after these messages and let’s talk about what can SRM do and what it cannot from the standpoint of other issues related to human interaction and cultural issues that are surfacing just because we are taking our call centers to different countries and also there are geographically dispersed organizations, so across the globe. Let’s delve more into this when we come back from the break, so please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:58]:
Welcome back to the show folks. For listeners who just tuned in, today’s topic is the Service Resolution Management and our guest for today’s show is Alan Hubbard. Alan is Executive Vice President of research and development with KANA Software. Before the break, we had picked up a point with respect to the human interaction and cultural differences and the things which, the problems which they pose when we are trying to handle customer service issues, especially when we have globally dispersed call centers and or organizations. What is SRM doing in that respect? Why there would be a workflow management and knowledge management. Everything would be there by the end of the day. A human being is dealing with another human being.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:37]:
So what is being done to facilitate or help in that regard?

Alan Hubbard [00:45:41]:
I think actually when you think of SRM, it takes some of that out of the picture and so again what you’re training people on is the business process and so now they’re understanding the business process and every one of the agents is executing that business process in the same way and correct answers with the customer interaction. So I think the cultural differences become less important because now you’re not, having to train people on the systems and making sure that they understand the privacy systems that they need to use and they may get confused early on in their training with what to do and when to do it but you take that out of that because you’re now training them on the process and they can easily work through those things and so I think SRM from that perspective is actually going to add a tremendous amount of value.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:31]:
So let me ask you this. While of course the product vendor, it goes against you, but are there any reasons why a particular enterprise should not choose to go for SRM.

Alan Hubbard [00:46:43]:
Did not choose to go to SRM ?

Sanjog Aul [00:46:45]:
What would be the different factors or maybe they are too early in that one of course natural thing is to say your business processes are not up to speed. That’s one of course obvious reason but are there any because when you qualify a customer, even as when you’re trying to go and approach them, there would be some qualification criteria this is good for this kind of company versus not good for this kind of company because it will not create enough value for them to spend that much money.

Alan Hubbard [00:47:08]:
I think if we look at companies, this is really directed at the call center, with a call center that has the hundreds of agents. So where there’s a tremendous amount of people working on a product, that’s not to say it couldn’t work at a call center with 10 to 15 agents. It really could, but it really is driven and focused on some of the largest companies and saying that how do we then automate those problems because I think if you’ve got a smaller call center, you probably don’t have some of the training issues that are there. You may not have as much turnover and things like that. So this may not, the pain might not be there for the smaller companies where this pain is definitely there for the larger call centers as they try to do their jobs.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:57]:
For any adoption of SRM for an organization, are there some factors which are very key because if they’re not kept in mind, then it could be a recipe for disaster if they were to implement SRM.

Alan Hubbard [00:48:09]:
I think, and I’ve said this a couple times now, it really is the definition of the business process and understanding it and then really prioritizing it, also what are the most important ones. What are the ones that you’re going to get the biggest bang for the buck for as solving your customers problems? Where is your customer’s pain and that’s really understanding what your customer’s problems are and it’s interesting is when you go into this, oftentimes when I visit call centers and talk to our customers, I say when was the last time you really asked your customers what their problems are with you and somebody will always stand up and say, we already know what their problems are and here they are and generally if there’s 10 issues, they’ll get six, seven of them but what happens is they won’t get them al and when they don’t get them all, what they’re missing is that customer interaction piece and actually satisfying or increasing the customer satisfaction as a part of that. So it’s something that you really have to spend the time and turn around and look at your customers and say what are your problems and how am I difficult as a company to deal with and understanding that? So it’s a different methodology, it’s a different approach. So yes, it’s document the business processes and understand what those are, but it’s also understand what your customers pain points are and making sure that your business process actually maps to solving those pain points.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:40]:
So what do you see in terms of the standards that are available? First of all, any new technology for it to be evolving properly and not have 10 different vendors forcing their own 10 year standards? Are there any standards bodies been established? Are there been any focus groups? Not particularly focused group, but some standard bodies which.

Alan Hubbard [00:49:59]:
One of the standard parties that we’ve been working with lately is BPMI, the Business Process Management Initiative and truly this is a group that has been trying for a number of years to document how you capture business process, how you actually document that in a common manner and that you might even be able to share to your earlier question from a B2B perspective with other companies because again, if you have a business process that stand multiple enterprises, how do you communicate that? So we’ve begun to work with those folks and say, okay, how did that map into SRM because business process is obviously the underlying issue here of how do you define it, how do you manage it, how do you work with it within your organization? So we’ve started working with them, understanding where they’re at, how they’re approaching it and where we might be able to add value and where we can take some of what they’ve done and use it internally.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:56]:
So how do you see the academia and the corporations or the enterprises help? How can they contribute towards successful evolution of this technology?

Alan Hubbard [00:51:06]:
I think from the perspective of the business world, I think what they will bring to the table here is their definition of what the problem is, of what we’re trying to solve and how to solve that problem. So I think that’s really critical because I think with people like myself who have worked in this industry for a long time and again, part of the issue is sometimes you think you already know the answer, you think you already know the problem and yes, we might know 60 or 70% of it applied to the what the enterprises are going to bring to the table is here are the real issues that you need to focus on and then as far as academia is concerned, I think this is where some of the new applications of the technology will arise. As we look at people’s got to see what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and then they’ll take that and it’ll begin to evolve and how do you actually use that and academia is always the place where some of that leading edge comes from and you really need to be able to listen to that because I think sometimes people will turn and say that’s not real world experience, that’s just academic. Truthfully, that’s where some of the best ideas come from,

Alan Hubbard [00:52:16]:
so what we need to do as a company is listen to our customers and then listen to the people who can actually point us in the right direction and say these are some of the technologies that you could apply to the solutions.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:28]:
Now how do you see SRM evolving in coming years. There’s of course your creating the first flavor of SRM right now but there would be certain things which you see already in two, three years down the line or maybe more, you will see a totally different, you know, do aspects of that coming out.

Alan Hubbard [00:52:44]:
I think and I think we’ve touched on a couple of them. One is the overall learning, having the ability to learn as you go through and work with your customers and capture that information. We do that in some ways today but the needs to become much more sophisticated and then the linkage back to the overall business. If you think of the call center itself and the metrics that it provides, it really is the front chasing piece of the corporation to the customer and so you need to understand what those interactions are, how well they went, what the perception of the customer. So feeding that back into the overall strategic direction of a company.

Alan Hubbard [00:53:24]:
So how can you facilitate that as part of a resolution flow and then finally there’s always going to be new technologies, there’ll be new platforms that you need to work on. Whether it’s Wi-fi, as we talked about a little earlier, there’s always going to be something there that we’re going to look and say I need to provide that functionality there.

Sanjog Aul [00:53:45]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I would like to thank you Alan, for sharing your thoughts and insights about the service resolution management.

Alan Hubbard [00:53:53]:
Thank you Sanjog. It’s really been a pleasure to sit here and talk. This is really, it’s a new niche. It’s something that I think everybody, as they start to steal back the onion and understand what SRM is, they realize very quickly that it’s solving the customer’s problem and that’s what the most important thing.

Sanjog Aul [00:54:11]:
Thank you again. Service Resolution Management aims at addressing an important issue related to effectively solving a customer problem. So media technology, it can primarily help in optimizing information availability to customer service, real time access to relevant case information and automate a few other customer service related tasks. So there are areas related to customer service personnel training and optimization of underlying customer service, business processes and guidelines. These are the two things which definitely SRM does not have control over because that’s what’s controlled by the business and they are very critical and needs to be addressed before SRM can actually create value. We have to wait and watch. If SRM has the same fate or is going to have the same fate as CRM, that is not enough ROI realized after millions of dollars already invested. Hope the lessons we’ve learned with CRM would be used and people would make corrective measures so that SRM comes out to be having much more value to the vendors as well as for to the potential adopters and since they will be more cautious.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:21]:
What are your thoughts about service resolution management and can it help your organization? Let us know your thoughts at talkshow.participate@avval.com that is talkshow.participate@avval.com. Thank you again for listening to managing technology the right way. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next Friday, take care and god bless.

Download Podcast
Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, and Stitcher. Find other syndication channels here or search CIO Talk Network podcast on any other app.
Explore More